Case in Hindi

I argue that Hindi clitic postpositions are not markers/realizations of case. Hindi has a genuine case system represented by the direct, oblique and vocative inflected forms of nouns. So-called case markers such as ne 'Ergative' or ko 'Accusative/Dative' are better thought of as non-projecting words (Toivonen 2003) selecting the oblique case form of their noun complements. Since the postpositions fail to project a phrase the case property of the head noun will be inherited by the NP/DP argument, so that any NP/DP marked with a postposition will itself be in the oblique case. Predicate agreement can now be stated very simply as 'agree with the direct case marked NP'.